Gabriel Martin

Gabriel Martin (1757-October 1780) was a Corporal of the Continental Army from South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War. The eldest of Benjamin Martin's seven children, Martin was the first member of the family to side with the patriots during the war, and he served in George Washington's army before being involved in the partisan campaign in the South in 1780. He was killed at the battle of Black Swamp in October 1780.

Early life
Gabriel Martin was born in 1757, the eldest of seven children of Benjamin Martin and Elizabeth Selton, who died in 1773. His father was a war hero in the French and Indian War, best known for his victory over the Cherokee and France at the Battle of Fort Wilderness in 1761, while his mother came from a wealthy plantation family from Wakefield in York County, South Carolina. Unlike his father, who abstained from the 1776 South Carolina Assembly vote on passing a levy to assist in the maintenance of the Continental Army, Martin sided with the patriots during the American Revolutionary War. He decided to enlist in the Continentals after his friend Peter Cuppin enlisted that same year, despite his father not giving him permission. Martin would serve in the Northern Theater of the war under George Washington, and he saw winters at Valley Forge and Morristown. Peter Cuppin was killed at Elizabethtown (Elizabeth, New Jersey) in a skirmish with the British Army, and Martin himself would be wounded while serving as a marked dispatch rider; he escaped death when Banastre Tarleton's Green Dragoons massacred 200 soldiers of the Virginia Line in South Carolina in 1780 while he was serving under General Horatio Gates.

Martin returned to his family plantation on the Santee River, where he was cared for alongside other wounded patriots and British soldiers. However, the next morning Tarleton's dragoons ordered the house and barns to be burned down in retaliation for the Martins taking care of patriots, and Martin was taken as a prisoner-of-war when he confessed to carrying a dispatch for the Continentals. When Tarleton announced that he was to be hanged as a spy despite being a marked rider, Gabriel's fifteen year-old brother Thomas charged at the British in an attempt to save Gabriel, but Tarleton shot him through the heart. Tarleton then had twenty British troops take Martin back to Camden to be hanged. As the patrol headed through the woods, Benjamin Martin and his two sons Nathan and Samuel killed all of the British soldiers and freed Gabriel, and Benjamin decided to join his son's cause to avenge Thomas.

Guerrilla campaign
Upon arriving at the Continental Army camp of Colonel Henry Lee, Benjamin Martin was commissioned in the field as a colonel, while Gabriel was made a Corporal and placed under his father's command. Colonel Martin sent Gabriel to Wakefield and other towns on the north side of the Santee to raise militiamen for the cause, and an inspiring speech made by Martin and his childhood acquaintance Anne Howard at a local church led to twelve men joining the militia. The patriots waged guerrilla warfare against Charles Cornwallis' 8,000 British soldiers and 600 cavalry across York County, burning half of the bridges and ferries to Charleston and ambushing British troops and convoys. Martin helped his father in fighting against Cornwallis, and he would fight on another front as his father tied Cornwallis down. He would rendezvous with his family at a Gullah settlement after his aunt's plantation was burnt down, and he would marry Anne Howard, whom he had written to during his military career, in a Gullah ceremony.

In October of 1780, Anne and her family were killed when Tarleton and his Green Dragoons burnt down the town church as the population of the town was locked into the building, and Martin was incensed after finding out about this. He led a detachment of militiamen to Black Swamp to attack Tarleton's dragoons there, and all of the other militia and other dragoons were killed. Martin succeeded in wounding Tarleton in the chest with a gunshot, and he took a knife to finish Tarleton off. However, Tarleton turned over and stabbed Martin through the chest with a sabre as he lunged towards him, mortally wounding him. Tarleton fled as Benjamin Martin and his men arrived, and Gabriel died in his father's arms.